The Bone is Back
Too trouble-prone for nuclear alert and sidelined in the first Gulf War, the B-1 is today the busiest bomber in the fleet.
By David Noland
Air & Space Magazine, May 01, 2008

It’s one o’clock in the morning on December 17, 1998, a cool crystalline night at Thumrait Air Base in the Persian Gulf sultanate of Oman. Two Rockwell B-1B bombers idle on Runway 17. Cleared for takeoff, the first jet begins to roll, its afterburners washing the rocky desert landscape in a faint orange glow. Quickly gathering speed, the Lancer lifts off the runway and banks into a sharp turn to the right, heading west. Forty-five seconds later, the second B-1B follows. The two jets join up in a loose formation and turn north into the starry blackness.

For the B-1, this is an historic moment: the long anticipated first combat mission of the complex, expensive, and oft-maligned bomber delivered to the Air Force 13 years earlier. Born amid controversy in the 1960s, twice canceled, and plagued early by technical problems, the B-1 had seemingly gotten lost in the shadows—caught between the Boeing B-52, the iconic bomber of the past, and the Northrop B-2, the stealthy bomber of the future. In 1990, the B-1 had suffered the ultimate humiliation: staying Stateside during the first Gulf War, while the plodding, antique B-52s answered the call to duty.

But now, in Operation Desert Fox, the four-day 1998 air campaign against Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, the B-1 was finally getting a chance to prove its worth.

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